Academic research teams are often led by a single researcher. This principal investigator (PI)’s name usually becomes the name of the lab, it’s listed on published papers from the lab members, and their students become part of their academic lineage. But these labs contain other researchers, from fellow faculty to postdocs to graduate students and even undergraduates. They all contribute to the research process and product.
At Lehigh University, the lab of Dr. Claudia Reis, Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), follows this pattern. She works with colleagues at the Advanced Technology for Large Structural Systems (ATLSS) Engineering Research Center and in the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) facility. Her lab includes four graduate students in engineering of structures, Nasala Dongol and Jiaxing Zhou, both PhD students at Lehigh, Jorge Loyola-Romero, at Oregon State University, and Guilherme Endo, at the State University of Maringa–and for summer 2026, sophomore computer engineering student Alex Truong, who is part of the Summer 2026 STEM-SI undergraduate research program.
Alex came to Lehigh University from Central High School in Philadelphia, where he was part of the RoboLancers robotics team, which competes in robotics competitions. When he started with robotics as a high school freshman, Alex says, he “didn’t know anything. I had zero programming background, so most of my knowledge has been built on empirical data, me just doing it.”
Robotics competitions are judged on criteria such as how well the robot performs various tasks and on how the team itself performed. Alex describes these events as the high-stress type of fun, largely due to the time constraints of competition. As a programmer on the team, he usually worked with a robot whose design was in progress: the mechanics team built the robot’s physical structure and Alex’s team needed to work with that structure. “I would build code to control the motors, the mechanics,” he says “For example, we had an elevator system where you had a motor running on a pulley that raises a grabber. I’m controlling the position of the elevator as well as how fast it would go up.” Things like the weight of any of these components would impact how Alex did his part of the project, and the timeline added to the pressure. “Usually programmers get the robot last,” Alex says. “Most of the time we get the robot like a couple days before the competition. We [the programing team] had a say in the sensors being used, but we still pulled all-nighters just trying to get it working.”
Alex chose Lehigh University for its engineering program, and he started out in the Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE) program, which combines engineering with product development and entrepreneurship. It was a great opportunity but he realized he wants to concentrate on engineering, and found that business wasn’t a priority for him.
For summer 2026, Alex has moved into a research-oriented role in Dr. Reis’s lab. The research group focuses on fluid-solid interactions in coastal and offshore environments, and specifically on how critical infrastructures respond to multiple natural hazards. For example, ports are critical infrastructure located in regions naturally prone to extreme events, such as hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis. Dr. Reis uses what’s called a “multiphysics” approach to characterize and leverage the performance of the infrastructure (soil-foundation-structure) to these extreme events.
Alex, who is part of the Rapidly Accelerated Research Experience (RARE) program at Lehigh, applied to work with Reis under the umbrella of the STEM-SI program. Both the RARE and STEM-SI programs offer undergraduates a first in-lab research experience under the mentorship of faculty and graduate students. Alex says he was interested in the program because he’s “never done actual professional research before, just robotics and different side projects. I thought doing something industry standard would be a nice experience to have.”
In Dr. Reis’s lab, that experience is measuring wave heights. The researchers, investigating scour, are processing data from a series of videos showing waves hitting a specimen resembling a circular pile. The goal is to integrate water flow, soil erosion, and structural stability measurements to better understand the phenomena. Alex is processing the data around these waves. But like a lot of research, it’s tedious. Each video requires “like 8,000 points and clicks” he says, in order to collect the required measurement for every frame of the video. In fact, his objective for his Research Day power is direct: “Take advantage of your computer background to measure waves from these videos accurately.”
To speed things up and relieve the tedium, Alex is trying to automate the process. His robotics background comes in handy, as does his ability to apply trial-and-error to find a solution. He has tried writing a code, but it requires a high level of human involvement: “When the wave hits a certain point, sometimes not even I know what the wave’s level is. So that requires manual input rather than model training.” He’s trying various open sources platforms such as Tracker from Open Source Physics, an application that lets users calibrate a video. “You tell it, from pixel to pixel, these are the real-life dimensions, then it scales it for you,” he says. It also “has some bugs I don’t like, so I fix those for convenience. I also add an autoclicker at like five clicks per second, so I can just move my mouse instead of me clicking.” He’s now trying to use YOLOv5, a computer vision model that can be trained.
Although his life post-Lehigh is a few years off, Alex has some clear goals. He’d like to stay in Philadelphia, get a job in industry, and try to build his own business, “then scale it once I have more capital to put into it.”
With his ability to focus on details, improve processes, and adapt technology to his own needs, Alex Truong is well on his way to achieving his plan.